Book Reviews Delmas-Marty, M. (ed.). What Kind of Criminal Policy for Europe? The Hague, London, Boston: Kluwer Law International, 1996. Pp. xiii, 332. Index. $225. The papers comprising this volume were first presented at a Colloquium in 1992 (i.e., around the time of the Treaty of Maastricht). The subject is both interesting and important. Crime is becoming internationalized. Governments do panic about this. Politicians do stir up a public opinion already sufficiently paranoid about crime, terrorism, immigration and asylum seekers and profit from media campaigns to rush through illiberal and often counter-productive laws. Moreover, policy-making at EC level in all these areas is dangerously secretive. It started in a number of informal working groups set up by the national governments to foster cooperation and collaboration (notably Trevi and Schengen) which, being inter-executive in character, required no formality and no publicity. After Maastricht in 1992, these had crystallized into the Third Pillar, perhaps an improvement from the transparency point of view but otherwise a defective mechanism. Amsterdam will, when implemented, move towards the elimination of some of the defects: the Parliament must be consulted, the Court of Justice will have at least limited jurisdiction and the Commission will be more closely involved. The subject is, however, still topical and much remains to be said on it. In a short introduction, Mme. Delmas-Marty sets out the problems as she sees them. Much criminality is international in character (drugs, financial fraud and terrorism to pick out some popular phobias), extending the problems outside the EC - a point not properly considered in the book. National criminal systems are notably divergent and this can be manipulated by lawbreakers. Moreover, the doctrine of supremacy means that EC law may have a neutralizing or even damaging effect on national criminal law and procedure (early case law, now overruled, even prohibited Member States from adding to regulations provisions punishing infractions of EC law). Which way should we go? The choice lies between subsidiarity, granting the Community sufficient powers to ensure consistency, or centralized 'Community crime'. A significant choice indeed. Its importance merits an intellectual rigour and theoretical framework which unfortunately it does not receive. The book, which, as already stated, originated in a colloquium, was first published in French in 1993 and is now translated. This is the source of many of its problems. We all know that conference papers normally need a good deal of rewriting, pruning, editing and referencing if they are to be worth publishing and this has apparently not been done. The papers are very uneven in quality. Some are extremely slight; the type of pallid presentation one expects from official participants at Euro-colloquia. Some are distinctly weak, such as the treatments of the ECHR fair trial guarantees. One or two are useful at a factual level, such as Biancarelli's assessment of the power to institute sanctions in EC law. Zielinska's account of the treatment of foreigners in Poland is clear and good. But what, one might ask, has this, part of a section on migration, to do with international crime? The translation is no doubt accurate, but stiff and colourless, making a generally lightweight book a heavy read. A final grumble. It is only in unusual circumstances that a four-year-old law book will be a safe source of reference. Similarly, policy papers lose their topicality. The publishers, who now style themselves Kluwer Law International, need to learn this lesson quickly. Carol Harlow Professor of Public Law London School of Economics
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